Night Shift
by Alexandra Spar
Summary: Someone unexpected comes to visit Henry, as she has done many times before. Oneshot.


She only did this at night.

Once Topham was settled in front of the late news with a brandy to hand and a cigar smouldering in an ashtray atop his _Radio Times_, she would wait until she heard the regular sonorous tone of his snoring, and then wait a little longer, and a little longer, until she was sure he was asleep. Then, quietly, wearing soft shoes and a dark coat, she would creep out and down the long winding drive to the roundhouse itself.

She was never really sure whether any of the other engines knew about these nighttime visits. If they did—well, she thought, they were keeping politely quiet about the whole thing, and that was just as well. It wasn't _done_, this sort of thing. Specially not by a person of importance such as herself.

But he had been so ill, and when he had come back from Crewe with his rebuilt body and his too-old mind, she couldn't help coming down, in the night, to visit him, and to tell him he was beautiful and strong and everything he ought to be. None of the others understood, that much was clear. Gordon was a blowhard; Thomas a child; James—well, she thought of James much as one might think of a teenage nephew—and the others really didn't interact with him very much.

She knew he never felt truly well; that he was constantly in pain, that he had learned to keep to himself the worst of it unless it really affected his functioning. The Welsh coal had helped; the Crewe rebuild had helped more; but he was still tired and aching and he found it difficult to get his breath on cold mornings, or on the steep grades of the mountain tracks. The others really didn't help. Time after time pranks had been played on him—switching his coal, filling his boiler with fouled water so that steam couldn't be raised right, telling tales to urge his engineer and fireman to do exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time…

She let herself into the roundhouse with her husband's passkey, and tiptoed with sure feet—feet that knew their way even in this darkness—to where he sat on his rails, his vast tender gleaming in the dim dead space, vague diffused moonlight picking out chrome and edges here and there. Silently she climbed up into his narrow cabin, and perched herself—no longer as svelte as she had been when Topham married her all those years ago, but still shapely—in the little engineer's nook beside the vast throttle levers. All around her the mingled smells of the engines settled like a comfortingly familiar blanket; oil, coal, sweet thick grease, smoke, hot metal still pinking gently as it cooled from that afternoon's red heat. There were a thousand tiny noises here in the cabin with her, but she paid no attention to anything other than the metal under her fingers—still warm—and the subtle change in the silence that told her he was awake, and listening.

He never slept very deeply, and he always woke when she climbed up and ran her hands over his controls, as she was doing now.

"'Licia?" he whispered. He could whisper; she had found that out early. His voice was a tenor, slightly rough around the edges, and when he wanted to he could be very loud indeed; but he was subtle.

"It's me. How are you?"

"Not so bad. Mostly passengers today, and the Arrow to the port and back again." She could tell by the timbre of his whisper that he was hurting, though, and something like a little fist closed just behind her breastbone.

"I….Should I tell him to give you a rest? Try something different? Maybe some new coal?"

Now his whisper was tinged with amusement around the edges. "You know as well as I do that I've the best of what can be offered. Really Useful Engines don't complain."

Alicia Farnham Hatt sighed. "I could kick him for that, you know. But—really, is there anything that can be done?"

"I don't know." His voice was very quiet. "It was….difficult, this morning. Up that long hill to the tunnels. Something hurts a bit in my smokebox."

"They run you ragged," she said, and stroked the curve of his pressure gauge. "If I had my way I'd have you moved to some other line, just for railway enthusiasts, with no steep grades or early morning starts."

"I can't," he said, gently. "You know I can't. I have work to do here, and I can do it."

She nodded, after a moment, and sighed. "Where in your smokebox?"

Henry told her. After a whole war's worth of driving ambulances, Lady Hatt had enough vague mechanical aptitude to understand what made these marvelous machines run, and enough native talent and experience with locomotives to understand what made them not run; and she knew every inch of this particular engine. She slipped down from the cabin and made her way to his front, and found some tools, and began to tinker.

The silence of the roundhouse was companionable; and if any of the other engines slumbering away with their noses pointing to the turntable and their tenders nestled against the wall had anything to say about nocturnal repair activity, none of them voiced an opinion. Outside the moon curved gently across the sky, and lit the roof and garden of the Controller's mansion; and somewhere, up in the sleeping forests, a whitethroat sang, on and on, like tears.


End file.
